Saturday, June 24, 2017

Hot! Hot! Hot!

Wow! Temperatures rose to up 34c😅degrees during June with not much rain to speak of. Although, we should be grateful for better weather, but when it is 20c during the night with windows open and just a fan blowing the air around, it gets uncomfortable.😳 It's also hayfever season, thankfully, Aldi had 14 day Loratadine for 89 pence. 😂

Also, during this month I have been attending anxiety and depression therapy sessions through Talking Space Plus. For some time now, I have had a mixture of anxiety and stress issues which were first reported to my doctor. A suggestion was made to contact Talking Space Plus about how they maybe able to help, so I registered with them and have found the sessions very helpful and informative. I didn't want to go down the path of relying on any form of medication, but each person is different and also every level of anxiety and depression. Life sometimes puts us through a lot of scenarios or we become involved in them without choice. The most important thing to do, is to ask for help or talk to someone about your situation. This is always the first and brave step to take! People can sometimes be quite judgemental and ignorant about a subject or scenario, so I would recommend talking to a professional or charitable organisation, trusted confident or friend or your doctor. This should always be free and never a chargeable case in any sense of the word!

Lego :: ( MOCs )

I was hoping to get the House speedbuild mentioned last month with the photograph teaser from April done. However, I haven't had much time to prepare, record and edit a video. I usually use time during a weekend or on a day off, but as we all know life does sometimes get in the way. I'll try and allocate some time during July, as I have three days off around mid month. So, fingers crossed! 😉

GameDev :: ( PC | Shooter - 16 Degrees)A small amount of time was spent this month setting up some of the rules for the now named shooting game, 16 degrees. The name derives from a recommended minimal office / school temperature advisory. Of course when I was at school and earlier jobs, you just had to put a coat on and kind of get on with it. So far, I have a moving ship that fires with a timing frequency.

GameMaker Studio 2 is becoming more and more enjoyable everything time I use it. Moving from version 1.4 hasn't been as bad as I first thought. If projects from 1.x to 2 are imported, you will be expected to look over your code and check everything. To be honest, I would start new projects in 2 and finish off others 1.x. It is usually better to work this way and would prevent frustrations at a later date.

The plan is to get the basic rules layed down and working as a start. Then once this is acheived other features, effect and backgrounds etc will be added. Even though I do like space themed shooting games, I would like to try and add some mixed backdrops with animated attract modes or objects. Little touches like this will make it look better and more interesting!

As you can see from the animated GIF, it's just the basics. Temperature will have an effect on the game play as well, just to make things a bit more interesting. I plan on putting in a few power ups, this will no doubt invovle those loveable variables! 😁

Eee PC Project :: ( Bunsen Labs Debian )

Last month I managed to get the Asus Eee 4G 701 PC working with an installation of Lubuntu with a minimal installation. However, for whatever reason, there wasn't much disk storage space left at the end. I think there literally only 200-300 megabytes left. So, thanks to recommendation of Lee Hearne, I installed Bunsen LabsDebian. Not only was the installation a lot quicker, it also left stacks of disk storage space, about 1+ gigabyte I believe.😄

Now, after the success I tried my hand at trying to install Emulation Station. After a few sudo updates via terminal, I had some results.

Part of the NintendoNESEmulation partly launched, but failed at RetroArch. So, for the time being there is a little more work to get at least one system up and running. I guess this will be a semi-regular slot with progressive updates. The main goal with this, is to have a mini arcade retro gaming PC! 😉